You do not shout. You say yes where you can. And when you do have to say no, you watch your child’s face fall, and before long you have taken it back — not because you were persuaded, but because you could not face the clash that was coming.
You would expect all this to produce a settled child. Instead you are getting the opposite: more clinging, more testing, a shorter fuse over smaller things.
That expectation is wrong, and it is worth seeing why.
It was never mainly about whether you were strict
Of everything a parent does, what makes things hardest for a child is not strictness. It is inconsistency — being one way today and another way tomorrow.
Yesterday it was allowed. Today the same request gets a different answer, and what changed was not the request but how the parent’s day had gone before the child walked in. A child in that house cannot learn the rule, because there is no rule to learn. What he can learn is how to read his parent’s face. So he studies that face, and he studies it hard.
Consistency is usually explained as holding a line. That is true, but it is not the whole story. What matters even more is that it lets a child see what is coming.
In the child’s mind it goes like this: “If I do this, Mum reacts like that. So I know what to do.”
When a child can predict how you will respond, he can prepare for it. When the same thing is allowed one day and punished the next, he cannot. So he watches instead — your face, your tone, your mood — for signs of trouble. With no way to prepare, he becomes anxious, and what looks like clinging or defiance is often that anxiety.
A limit is what makes a thing bearable
We tend to think that a limit hems a person in and makes things harder to put up with. In practice it often does the opposite: it makes things easier to bear.
Picture yourself in a lecture without knowing when it will end. A slightly dull stretch comes along, and suddenly it is close to unbearable — far worse than it really is — because you have no idea how much more is left.
Now suppose you have been told it finishes at nine. The same dull stretch comes along, and you sit through it. It ends at nine, you tell yourself, and you pull yourself together.
Nothing about the lecture changed. What changed is that you knew when it would end, so you could tell how much more there was to get through. A clear limit does the same for a child. Say the rule is one hour of video games today, and you calmly stick to it. He may be angry when the hour is up, but he knew from the start where it would end, and that makes the ending easier to bear.
Here is what parents find hardest to believe: a child who finds he can always make his parents give in does not become free. He becomes anxious, because nothing is holding him steady. In fact, part of him is hoping his parents will hold firm.
Holding the line brings conflict. That is normal
Saying yes to everything will not settle a child. There are moments when a parent has to hold firm, and holding firm has a cost.
Hold firm, and the conflict comes right on cue: anger, tears, accusations that you are being unfair. This is where most parents give in — not out of weakness, but out of a real fear that the conflict itself will hurt the child.
I see it the other way round. The conflict is not what hurts the child; it is where he learns.
Living through that conflict, the child learns two things. First, wanting something badly does not make reality change. Second, anger and disagreement do not end the relationship: you keep the limit, and afterwards you are still there and still close. Each time he goes through this, the limit you held becomes a little more his own: he finds that he can be told no, bear the feeling, and settle down again.
A childhood engineered to be free of conflict does not produce an adult who is at peace. It produces an adult who cannot be in a room where someone disagrees with him.
Warmth in front, firmness standing behind it
If you keep one image from this, keep this one.
Warmth is in front. It is the face the child meets, and it means taking his feelings seriously — really seriously, not as a trick to get him to obey faster. And behind it — not instead of it — stands firmness.
Firmness is not raising your voice. It is almost the opposite. It is calmly making two things clear: this is not allowed in our house, and on this I will not back down. You say it once, you mean it, and when the child tests it, it is still there.
Warmth without firmness makes the child keep testing because every protest may change the answer. Firmness without warmth teaches him that saying what he feels or wants will cost him your closeness, so he stops saying it. The child needs both: “I understand that you are angry” and “the answer is still no.”
Donald Winnicott, a paediatrician who went on to become a psychoanalyst, said that what a child needs in order to grow is not a faultless parent but an environment that holds him. In everyday terms, that means adults who accept his feelings while taking responsibility for the limits on what he does. The word “hold” has two meanings, and a child needs both. To hold a child is to cradle him gently. It is also to hold firm and not give way.
Protesting is allowed. Hitting you is not
One distinction should stay sharp, because parents who are working hard to be gentle sometimes blur it.
A child is allowed to be angry with you. He can argue, demand to know why, and tell you loudly that your decision is unfair. That is him expressing himself, and that is fine.
Hitting a parent is a different matter. That is not expression; it is crossing a line that must not be crossed. And this is where inconsistency does the most damage: if how you respond depends on the kind of day you are having, the child never finds out where the line is, and not knowing is worse for him than a firm answer would have been. What he needs to hear, every time, is something like: “I understand that you’re angry, but I won’t let you hit me.”
What comes first, second and third
First, consistency. The same answer today as yesterday. This one comes before anything else on the list, including the ones that sound more loving.
Second, understanding what he is actually feeling — the warmth in front. You will hear this everywhere, and it still cannot be skipped.
Third, firmness standing behind that warmth: the strength to hold your ground, even while he protests, on the things that really cannot be allowed.
If you and your child keep clashing, do not start by asking whether to become stricter or more lenient. Pick one argument that keeps coming back, look back over the past week, and compare how you answered it each time. If your answer changed with how tired you were, how guilty you felt or how your child reacted, then your child cannot tell what is coming and is always on guard. As long as your answer keeps shifting, he will stay anxious whether you are strict or soft.
References
- Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — cited here for “holding”.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.
Related
- The Good Enough Mother: Winnicott on Perfect Parenting
- Free-Floating Anxiety: Why Limits Feel Safe
- Why Setting Boundaries Causes Conflict
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board